Alice Neel: Painted Truths

Neel's passion was for people. Primarily a portrait painter she rarely accepted commissions, preferring to choose her sitters from those who came into her life - family, bohemian friends, East Harlem neighbours, political comrades and fellow artists and intellectuals.

She said that like Balzac's Human Comedy she wanted to portray the spirit of her times. Bored, restless, defiant, resentful, defeated, anxious, inquisitive, acquisitive, self-absorbed, alienated, dreamy, vain, dynamic - often several of these at once - her portraits sum up the changing US zeitgeist over more than five decades.

Working directly from her models, a practice denigrated as outdated by contemporary critics, she established a rapport which permitted her to capture their social and psychological essence with a freshness and intensity which avoided stereotypes.

Refusing to flatter or idealise Neel encapsulated their character and inner life via pose, gaze, stance and facial expression.

"Before painting when I talk to the person," she said, "they unconsciously assume their most characteristic pose, which in a way involves all their character and social standing - what the world has done to them and their retaliation."

Although her style changed subtly over time she remained a modernist, flattening space and using colour, line, touch and composition expressively so avoiding the conventional compositions and perspective, dark tonality, suppression of visible line and brushwork with which jobbing portraitists achieve a likeness. Like van Gogh, who Neel greatly admired, she simplified and outlined forms to express meaning.

In Art Shields (1951) the labour reporter for the Daily Worker sits compressed between a flat background and a table, his elbow and the top of his head cropped as if to burst out of the frame. This dynamism is further conveyed by a composition based on strong diagonals, formed by desk, torso, shoulders, arm, hand and craggy facial bone structure, while the angularity of the visible outlines also contribute to present Shields as a man of action dedicated to political struggle.

But Neel's paintings also reveal the sheer pleasure in making inventive marks on canvas by changing the rhythm and quality of line and touch in endless variations. Elegant, delicate, awkward, angular, decisive, sinuous, quirky, she prevented lapses into predictability. In Linda Nochlin and Daisy (1973) the feminist art historian is depicted with fast fluid brushwork, her daughter's hair a mass of squiggles.

Daughter of a railway company clerk and a housewife, she paid her own way through art school then spent a traumatic early adult life in which she lost one child to diphtheria and another to the upper-class family into which she had married.

Neel found her artistic and political maturity via New York bohemianism and Marxism in the 1930s, joining the Communist Party in 1935. Although she often let her membership lapse she retained a lifelong commitment to the left. And the left, with its limited means, exhibited and featured her work in its press.

The adoption by the young Soviet Union and the Mexican revolutionary artists of a realist, accessible visual language was a central issue of 1930s US Marxist debates in which Neel participated and whose publications, such as New Masses and the Daily Worker, she read.

Her commitment to realism, accessibility, humanism and to the class nature of consciousness stemmed from these Marxist aesthetics.

Neel told a Daily Worker interviewer in December 1950: "I am against abstract and non-objective art because such art shows a hatred of human beings. "East Harlem is like a battlefield of humanism, and I am on the side of the people there, and they inspire my painting."

During the cold war, when it was dangerous to publicly support communism and when US critics championed Abstract Expressionism and condemned US socialist realism as "outdated," Neel stuck courageously to her guns. Ignoring the fads and fashions of a market-driven art world, she retained her integrity.

By the same token her aesthetic as well as her gender caused her to be ostracised by the mainstream art world until feminist critics and art historians championed her in the late 1960s. Henceforth US museums bought and held solo exhibitions and her critical status grew, yet she remained relatively unknown in Europe.

The current Whitechapel exhibition, which will travel on to Sweden, was organised by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, which published the catalogue.

Its 60 paintings come from US museums, private collections and the Neel Estate. Promoted as Neel's first major exhibition in Europe, this claim overlooks her 1981 Moscow exhibition which displayed 85 of her works at the invitation of the Artist's Union, which had no trouble relating to her humanist realism, close as it was to post-Stalinist portraiture such as that of Pavel Korin.

The selection and grouping of works under themes such as "allegory," "parents and children," "psychological portraits" and "old age" reflect current liberal preoccupations and marginalise her political works and beliefs.

Interpretations of her work dwell on neurosis, the grotesque, celebrities, identity and Neel's personal life and professional status. Based on a value system which privileges fame and fortune, the curating seems bemused by Neel's lack of desire for either.

However it is still great that her work is being brought to a wider European audience. Hopefully some viewers will delve further into her biography, patronage and stated intentions to discover an impetus to her work which goes beyond the current repackaging of her as a dotty bohemian who dabbled in socialism.

Runs until September 17. Price £8.50/£6.50/free to under-16s on first Wednesday of the month.